Bad Smells
"Finally, I confessed all my sins to you
and stopped trying to hide my guilt.
I said to myself, 'I will confess my rebellion to the
Lord.'
And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone."
--Psalm 32:5
and stopped trying to hide my guilt.
I said to myself, 'I will confess my rebellion to the
Lord.'
And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone."
--Psalm 32:5
Have you ever had trouble holding in good news?
When
good
things happen, it can be difficult to bottle in big news that you really want to share.
But
the opposite effect takes place when we feel
shame. Shame leads us to secrecy. The author of
Psalm 32 is looking back, writing about
a time in his
past
when
he was holding something in that he really needed to share with God.
Every year when I opened the door the hall for the first time, I remembered how terrible the smell is in a guys’ freshman
dorm. It
smelled
like I was on the inside of a warm, sweaty sock.
However, about
a month into each school year, I would stop noticing the smell. Living there
long enough made the dorm smell normal to me.
Scientists say that part
of
the job of our noses is to
bring new smells to our attention—it’s a safety mechanism. If we stay in a place that
smells
bad long
enough, we stop noticing the offensive odor. So in the
dorm,
I didn't notice the smell after a while. The
smell didn’t actually go away. I just couldn’t smell it
anymore.
It’s the same way with our sin.
Richard Rohr defines sins as “fixations
that prevent the energy of life, God’s love from flowing freely. They are
self-erected blockades that cut us off from God and hence from our own
authentic potential.”
At first, when we’re involved in a behavior we know is wrong, the stench of that sin bothers us. It's
alarming and that’s a healthy function of our psyche. Our conscience taps on
our
skull because we know we shouldn’t
be
doing what
we’re doing.
But
when we live in the routine of repeating a sinful
behavior again and again, that behavior starts to
seem
normal to us. We don’t
think of it as sin.
It’s when we take a step back and see the big picture that we realize how much our habits were hurting us.
It’s when we take a step back and see the big picture that we realize how much our habits were hurting us.
If growing close to Jesus makes you uncomfortable
about the way you act, that can be a good thing.
You're noticing the stench again. We can't surrender sin that we don't acknowledge as sin.
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